Joanne And The Beatles

[Guest Tim]

JOANNE AND THE BEATLES

 

By Desmond Zwar

 

Londoner Joanne Petersen was as close as anyone to The Beatles.

 

As secretary to their manager, Brian Epstein, she saw them as ‘ordinary people’, with their public facades left aside, sighed through their tantrums with them, their highs and their lows.

 

Working today as director of creative services to music publishers MCA in Sydney, Joanne guides young song-writers to fame. Pausing along the way to share her memories...

 

Married to ex-Bee Gees drummer, Colin Petersen, Joanne recalls the personalities of the lads who became world famous…

 

Paul McCartney: 'He was the PR Beatle; always conscious of their public image and of keeping everyone happy. He had a sunny, outgoing nature. It was fairly important to Paul that everybody liked him.

 

'This was demonstrated in Manila when a nasty situation arose over a mix-up between The Beatles' PR and President Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. After their concert the boys were sitting in the aircraft waiting to go home, not realising anything untoward was going on. But at the Palace, the Marcos's were sitting, waiting for them to arrive and sign autographs. Nobody had told The Beatles.

 

'Somebody arrived at the plane to tell them to get off and go to the Palace. They had surrounded the plane with troops and the ground staff had downed tools to prevent it taking off. It was becoming an international incident.

 

'Paul could be seen through one of the aircraft windows, smiling; in fact he was angrily chewing the band's publicist Tony Barrow's head off. Paul realised he could be seen and that he was being photographed, so he kept on looking happy...

 

'I used to go and stay with Lulu in St John's Wood, which was just around the corner from where Paul lived. He had a sheep-dog, "Martha"; we used to walk Lulu's dog in the evenings and meet up with him walking Martha, who became famous in the song he wrote "Martha My Dear".

 

'Then he would come back to Lulu's for coffee and we would play records. We were just regular kids. He was so easy to get along with, and so friendly. Always.'

 

George Harrison. 'He was quieter, and more of a thinker. In later years he became involved in the spiritual side of life, and became more of a recluse. But I always got along really well with him. I liked him because he was down-to-earth.

 

'When Brian died, he was particularly comforting to me. He was the youngest in the band and the quietest.'

 

Ringo Starr. 'What you saw was what you got, with Ringo. A bit of a clown and very much fitting the image of a drummer.'

 

When Joanne's mother was cleaning up after Joanne's 21st birthday party, she opened a cupboard and out fell Ringo.

 

'She dusted him off and sent him on his way.'

 

John Lennon. 'There was something about him that was quite awesome. In a lot of ways I was always in awe of him. He had a wicked wit.

 

'I would ask John if he wanted a cup of tea and he would just look at me for a moment and turn it into some other meaning. I used to just flee!

 

'He just had a presence about him. He was laconic. He had this acerbic wit; and an atmosphere that was strong and charismatic. There has been so much written about John by people trying to describe him. I just thought he was an amazing person; such a talented person. His stage persona was powerful, and as a person he was powerful. If I could assess all their IQs I would say John probably had the biggest.

 

'Brian Epstein handled all these egos incredibly well. He knew them and knew their individual personalities and their different idiosyncrasies. He never bullied. He was warm and close to them, very much the fifth person in the outfit. When they were all together it was a very close-knit relationship.

 

'I used to look at him sometimes and see him looking at them with such warmth and love for them.'

 

John Lennon and Paul McCartney would arrive at Epstein's house and squat on the settee writing songs while Joanne typed on the other side of the room. When they'd gone she had to scoop up scraps of scribble-pads, pages of exercise books and hotel stationery they'd kept, and throw the lot into a waste-paper basket.

 

There were difficult issues that Epstein had to sort out, she remembers; 'he was very good at putting it to them in a way that he would get around them. He would sometimes tell them all the things they didn't have to do, before he would tell them what they had to do.

 

'When you consider he had never ever managed a band or been involved in anything like this before, he was very instinctive in the way he handled The Beatles. It was an absolute labor of love for him.'

 

Joanne found Brian Epstein dead in his bedroom. 'He had been troubled and depressed and often lonely.' His homosexuality - at a time when homosexuality was rarely discussed - had caused him anxiety. She believes there was never a relationship between Epstein and Lennon, 'though Brian just adored John.'

 

The coroner's verdict was accidental death. The cumulative effect of a drug he was taking killed him at 32.

 

It was years before she could bring herself to talk about the discovery of his body.'Then I agreed to cooperate with Ray Coleman, who wrote a book on Brian. I got a call from him saying he had been researching for two years and all roads led to me. He needed to talk to me. I had never ever done any interviews, but I went over to New York and we spent a week together going over so much stuff. He is a lovely man and he really stuck to his word about correctly quoting what I said.'

 

While Joanne was surrounded by drug-taking: LSD, 'uppers', 'downers', and cannabis, she took nothing.

 

Wasn't it hard not to be influenced, when all The Beatles and her boss, Brian Epstein were habitually swallowing them?

 

'Not for me. It wasn't that I was strong. It was just that I wasn't interested. I saw a lot of people taking drugs; an awful lot of casualties from that era. It kind of intrigued me that people would do that to their bodies.

 

'I am not sure if they were searching for any inner depth. It was an experimental age. The 50s were years of adjustment after the war. Then the 60s came and a whole new generation had grown up, with a generation gap probably wider than any. It was such an exciting, spirited time to be in London. People had a different, optimistic attitude towards the future. The world had changed so much after the war and these children had been born at the end of it. Their parents had come out of a difficult period of austerity and here were their children with such freedom!

 

'Kids were taking LSD, I think, perhaps to make them more enlightened, more aware.

 

'Nobody said to me: "Come on, try it..." People just did what they wanted to do. There was enough freedom for you to do what you wanted to do. There were a lot of young people who didn't take drugs, just as there are today.'

 

Joanne got the Epstein job after meeting George Harrison and Ringo Starr drinking in a London club. She was 20 and had told them she was about to leave the property company she had been working for. They said: "Phone Brian."

 

She did. And years later Epstein's mother told her what had clinched it: she was famous bandleader Joe Loss's niece, 'and Brian was enormously impressed. He loved the Joe Loss Orchestra.

 

One of the scraps of paper she did keep is a draft of the publishing agreement for ‘Yesterday’. Her name appears besides Lennon's, McCartney's and Epstein's as a witness.